The Emotional Substrates of Environmental Preferences

尽管气候变化对全球公众的重要性与日俱增，但公众对这一问题的态度和政治方法仍然高度两极分化。随着研究人员开始认识到，这种话语越来越情绪化，我们现有理解中的一个漏洞出现了；情绪在环境偏好的形成中扮演了什么角色？一系列广泛的政治学研究证明了情绪在塑造个人政治参与和态度方面的力量，这种力量建立在情感智力理论的基础上，该理论强调了恐惧、愤怒和热情三个维度中的离散情绪在态度形成和改变中发挥的作用。在环境政治方面，类似的研究探索各种离散情绪和个人对全球变暖的态度之间的关系，但将重点限制在个人对情绪刺激的反应上。有鉴于此，这项博士研究旨在通过回答以下核心研究问题来促进人们对情绪对环境态度的认识：在气候治理的政策领域，a)政府和社会运动如何使情绪发挥作用；b)情绪如何促使人们参与环境运动；c)情绪如何影响大众的环境态度？围绕这个问题设计的研究框架将从第一年开始制定详细的研究框架和广泛的文献综述，然后第二年致力于数据收集。收集的数据将在第三年用于实现两个目标。第一，确定情绪对与环境问题有关的公众的影响，使用实验室实验调查与环境相关的情绪刺激对英国和美国的政治行为和态度的影响。这篇论文将建立在现有研究的基础上，试图区分和探索愤怒、热情和焦虑的情绪维度对环境态度如何形成和如何变化的离散影响。鉴于新的环境发展可能产生新的研究领域，进行自然实验的潜力也应该得到承认，基于类似设计的研究，探索意外威胁如何影响政治态度。第二，探索参与者在气候治理操作中使用情绪的方式，研究行为者在气候治理背景下使用情绪力量的方式，超越当前环境情绪研究的孤立、个别和以接受为中心的分析。这将通过对政府精英和激进团体的环境演讲和政策宣言进行量化的情感话语分析来实现，这是一种新出现的方法，本论文首次将其应用于环境政治。这一分析将被用来区分AIT的各个情感维度，并探索其在气候话语中的相对地位，这一点在以前还没有做过。结合这两个研究目标，本论文旨在揭示气候行为者运用情感话语的性质，以及这对公众的影响，以更好地理解情感在气候治理中的作用。这项研究有助于加深对姿态变形和气候传播的理解，有助于建立一种渐进的气候政策霸权，保护我们的自然世界。更广泛地说，这篇论文将进一步理解民主健康，帮助我们理解政治话语中的情绪对大众民主参与和理解的影响。

Despite the growing global public significance of climate change, popular attitudes and politicalapproaches to the issue remain highly polarised. As researchers begin to recognise that this discourse isincreasingly framed emotively, a lacuna in our existing understandings emerges; what role do emotionsplay in the formation of environmental preferences?A broad array of political science research has demonstrated the power of emotions in shapingindividual political participation and attitudes, built around Affective Intelligence Theory, whichhighlights the role that discrete emotions within the three dimensions of fear, anger and enthusiasmplay in attitude formation and change. In environmental politics, similar research exploring therelationship between a variety of discrete emotions and individual attitudes toward global warming, buthas restricted its focus to the responses of individuals to emotional stimuli. Thus, there has been afailure to explore the way in which climate actors employ emotions and the way they operate on a masslevel.In the light of the above, this PhD research will aim at advancing knowledge on the impact of emotionson environmental attitudes by answering the central research question of: in the policy area of climategovernance a) how do governments and social movements operationalise emotion b) how emotionsmobilize people to participate in environmental movements and c) how emotions affect environmentalattitudes in mass publics?The research framework designed around this question will begin with a first year developing a detailedresearch framework and extensive literature review, followed by a second year devoted to datacollection. The data gathered will then be used in the third year to fulfil two objectives.First, to establish the impact that emotions have on mass publics in relation to environmental issues,using lab experiments to investigate the impact of environmental-related emotional stimuli on politicalbehaviour and attitudes in the UK and USA. This thesis will here build upon existing research byattempting to distinguish and explore the discrete impacts of the emotional dimensions of anger,enthusiasm, and anxiety on how environmental attitudes are formed and how they change.Given the possibilities of new environmental developments generating new areas of research, thepotential to conduct a natural experiment should also be recognised, building on similarly designedstudies exploring how unexpected threats impact upon political attitudes.Second, to explore the ways that actors employ emotions in the operations of climate governance,studying the use of emotional power by actors in climate governance contexts, moving beyond theisolated, individual and reception-focused analysis that characterises current environmental emotionalresearch. This will be achieved through a quantitative emotional discourse analysis of environmentalspeeches and policy manifestos from governmental elites and activist groups, a newly emerging methodwith this thesis its first use in environmental politics. This analysis will be used to differentiate betweeneach emotional dimension of AIT and explore the relative status in climate discourse, something thatonce again has not been done before.In combining both research objectives, this thesis aims to reveal the nature of emotional discursivepower as wielded by climate actors, and the impacts this has on mass publics, in order to betterunderstand the role of emotion in climate governance. In advancing understandings of attitudeformation and climate communication, this research may contribute to the establishment of aprogressive hegemony of climate policy and the preservation of our natural world. More generally, thisthesis will further understandings of democratic health, helping us to understand the impact ofemotions in political discourse upon popular democratic engagement and understanding.